Nikki Craft's essay "Drifting from the Mainstream: A Chronicle of Early Anti-rape Organizing and WASP," published in Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense, edited by scott crow, PM Press, 2014. Pages 168-175. Foreword by Ward Churchill.

The essay documents the founding and activities of WASP — Women Armed for Self-Protection — cofounded by Craft and other women in Dallas, Texas in the early 1970s. It chronicles the group's split from Dallas Women Against Rape (DWAR), their arms training, police surveillance and phone tapping, leafleting campaigns identifying rapists by name and photograph, and the group's eventual dissolution. The essay was originally written circa 1979 and edited for this publication.

Includes a photograph taken by Nikki Craft — "Women Armed for Self-Protection shooting practice outside of Dallas, Texas, 1975" — credited to Nikki Craft.

Footnote 3 documents how the WASP leafleting action directly led to the founding of the Kitty Genovese Women's Project, which compiled the names of every indicted sex offender in Dallas County from 1960 to 1976 and distributed over 20,000 copies of a newspaper listing 2,100 names.

Setting Sights contributors include Dennis Banks, Kathleen Cleaver, Mabel Williams, Subcomandante Marcos/EZLN, Angela Y. Davis, Kristian Williams, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Ashanti Alston. Craft's work appears alongside histories of the Black Panther Party, the Spanish Civil War, the IWW, the American Indian Movement, and community armed self-defense movements internationally.

Part of the Nikki Craft Archival Project. Published Works. 

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